The order must be, that is, keep your work environment in check

One situation that happened recently inspired me to write this article. An article to make you aware that everything can be a threat in trade. Even a trader's workplace or tools that he uses for trading and which were supposed to help, not interfere. Let's start with a summary of what happened first.

I note that this article is not intended to discredit this person in any way or is not an attack on it. This is an educational article that aims to illustrate several important things to you.

"Bad broker, bad broker"

On one of the discussion forums in the thread of a certain broker, one of the users complained about the hanging platform, mainly at critical moments, i.e. near the publication of macro data or at dynamic price changes. Until some time everything was fine, and after X months of trading, such problems began to appear. This is of course embarrassing, because it does not give you the opportunity to react while the most is happening.

The first reaction was to write about the problem on the forum. The accusation fell on the broker. Whatever the case, it happened to me that with a greater load from traders, their servers did not develop and simply crashed or disconnected. Therefore, initially I would have become suspicious myself. Following further similar inconveniences, the tone was even more hostile, leading the discussion to unequivocally judge that it was'bungling‚From the IT department, the entire company and their lack of professionalism.

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Diagnosis of the problem

So I sent a request to this company whether they actually recorded any technical problems. The answer was negative, and no one reported similar problems on the forum. I did not see them either.

The client did not contact the broker here. Also, no key data was provided in the form of a record of activities from the platform (the so-called logs) or the customer's account number, which would help to identify him and thoroughly investigate the problem. The broker itself is also rarely involved in forumbecause after 1. he has a hotline and built-in chat to report problems there, after 2. he cannot disclose confidential data to the public (and even data that could lead to the identification of a given person), after 3. users of discussion forums have tendencies to involve broker's representatives in discussions that lead to nowhere, which is a waste of energy and time :).

My contact with the broker resulted in a short hypothesis of what can actually cause the problem and present a preliminary solution. At the next failure, the user could not follow these instructions for technical reasons, and the suggested solution would not be successful.

The basis is contact

Willingness to cooperate on both sides. This was missing. If something does not work for us, it is best to report it directly to the staff, providing them with as many details as possible. The broker might not even be aware of any inconvenience, especially since everything was fine on his part. It cannot be assumed in advance that "I will not write to him, because he will not want to help me anyway." If we don't write, he won't even have a chance to help us :).

Of course, the trader's first suspicion was natural. These could be problems with the broker's servers. But it is also easy to verify by asking others if they have the same problems, and even by checking the mobile platform on the phone. You can even ask the broker in a chat if everything is OK with him. These are not the times when the company will "bullshit" us that the servers are working when they are not. It's so easy to verify that there's no point in lying.

Believe it or not, everyone decent broker he wants his client to be satisfied. Technical support is really knowledgeable and willing to help. It's just that it's just people too. And we have to approach them as people.

We require the impossible

Sometimes, we sometimes have exaggerated expectations. This is partly due to our ignorance, and partly from the frustration that overwhelms us (because the market is running away and we are powerless). Speaking of exaggerated expectations, I mean having the ability to read in mind by employees of brokerage houses.

How would most of you react to the sentence "because it doesn't work for me"? Many people write to me with this type of problem. This raises a series of questions like "what's not working?", "What are the symptoms?", "When did it start?", "What is the operating system, platform version, what's installed on it ...?" etc. etc. Sometimes the problems are very unusual and the information provided makes it really hard to even guess what might be causing them. And so, after exchanging 20 e-mails, we still do not know anything (of course it could end up with 3 e-mails if as much data as possible were provided at the very beginning). On the one hand, support cannot require every user to have extensive technical knowledge, but also the client should not require superhuman skills from the support.

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In the absence of cooperation on the part of the trader, it remains to recommend typical solutions, such as reinstalling the platform, checking its settings, anti-virus, firewall, other system options ... But this may not bring the expected result. There may be as many causes of inconvenience as there are variables.

It happens that this ends with the trader saying "you obviously don't want to help me". Only that it is first and foremost that we ourselves must want to help ourselves. And get involved in it.

Trial and error method

This is the most common way to get to what makes us "not working". The problem is that the broker service is in the office, and we are sitting in front of our computer with a platform that notices problems. And if it becomes unlikely that the fault lies with the broker and the whole problem is not global (it does not apply to all users of only one or some narrow group), then the experimental path remains, i.e. tedious testing and excluding one factor after another, until suddenly will start working. It's a tedious job, but no one will do it for us. It is very difficult to help someone remotely without knowing what that person is actually doing and what their technical knowledge is.

There is also a chance that someone once had the same problem and found a solution - then the matter becomes banal. As long as we find such a person.

An ideal trader's workplace?

The solution is… order, peace, patience. Many of us have stuffed our platform with indicators, machines, semi-automatic machines found in the network, configured it according to their very unusual preferences ... We also download historical data from networks of unknown origin, we launch a large amount chartseven though we use 1/3 of them… It creates a mess. Or rather a chaos in which only we see a shadow of order. This can load the platform and make it run slower or simply not function properly.

Similarly, it can be with the configuration of the computer itself, the more so if several people use it. Installed games, software downloaded from torrents and other uncertain sources, and contrary to appearances, also applications that were about to protect us, that is anti-viruses and firewalls, often get so dirty in the system registry or network settings (eg block the particular port range through which connects platform) that they can effectively complicate us using the trading platform. And we can not even know about it.

Therefore, it is worth isolating our trading environment from the rest of the activities to which the computer serves us and, above all, to ensure order on the platform itself. Let's treat her like an operating surgeon. Let it contain the necessary minimum that we need.

If something suddenly stops working for us, keep calm. Let's hold back on the accusations of everyone else and first diagnose the problem. Let's ask, let's explore the topic. Let's contact the support. Let us patiently look for a solution ... And if someone fails us and we have nothing to complain about ourselves - then let's do the "smoke" :).